I've also seen the & site: search return all indexed urls, and the * site: search return pages that I did not think were supplemental. These searches were never documented by Google - they are hacks, and perhaps cannot be counted on any more. Or, perhaps Google is pushing the supplemental index into a new "version", as they said they would. We can't tell for sure, but it does seem like it's all getting cloudy.

Supplementals are still different, I'd say, but we just lost our certainly as to what urls are actually supplemental.

If I type in "widgets" at google, the home page of one of my sites comes up on the 14th page of results. If I type in "widgets/*", the home page comes up on the 11th page of results. The home page has a pr4 and is not in the supplemental results because if I type in "site:mysite.com/*", it is the first result.

At one point (in Feb.), every page on the site other than the home page and one other were in the supplemental index, so I've worked to get most of the pages out of supplemental and am aware of the status of the home page.

My feeling is that maybe the home page is getting hit with an overoptimization penalty for this particular word or lack of stemmed versions of this word, hence its being put on the 14th page versus the 11th page.

It comes up number one for a common two-word variation, ie "technical widgets".

Okay... if you're still reading, my question is, "What is the slash-asterisk for?" Is anyone else seeing it to indicate something other than what is in the supplemental index?

For this term that I mentioned above, when typing it in at Google, the first result is a wikipedia definition, with the page having a pr6. The next result is a site's home page which has a pr4. The site's clientele is a plural form of my search word's root. The third result is a site that has a pr5. Again, it is a site that focuses on a plural form of my search word's root and is an online community. The fourth site is kind of a themed link site.

In other words, #1 is a definition and history site, #2 might appear to google to be a community of sorts (altho it's actually a commercial site, requires payment for participation, and is not applicable to the vast majority in the community), and #3 is an online community of people interested in this topic.

If I search with the /* after the term, the fourth site is listed first. It's the most applicable site for people who work in this area. It probably has a lot more links to it than any other results on the first page.

The Google Directory category is not above the fold when doing a search with the /* but is the 8th result when doing a search without the /*.

A non-profit organization for people in the field and a national magazine on this topic both also get boosted above the fold and disappear when the /* are added.

It seems obvious that the pages that get boosted are deemed to be authorities & hubs. It seems that google also has recently determined which of the pages at my site are most likely, themselves, to be authorities or hubs, because the listing, when doing site:mysite.com, now shows my home page first, sitemap second, variation on the sitemap third, subindices next, etc. In the past, the first result was the home page but the next result might be an article about how to get jobs in the industry or something similar (that others are likely to link to).

On the search of this term, there are twice as many results in the index when you add the /*, indicating that what google thinks of as less important is thrown out of the Primo index and only shows up if someone does a more specific search. But with site:mysite.com, that is reversed. You get the larger result without the /* added. I presume that's because someone doing a site: search generally wants to see everything from that site, not just what google deems to be most likely to be important.

Yes /* is those NOT in supplementals. I'm reasonably sure that's the case because that search shows the home page plus other key well-ranked pages for the site. It might not show all, but it looks reasonably accurate.

Subtract those returned by site/* from those returned by site (the full list) and I assume that would give those in supplemental. Any comments?

For sites that are using the www.domain.com version of the domain, I see that a site:domain.com -inurl:www search now shows a small selection of what I termed "Historical Supplemental Results" again, after not showing anything much at all for most such searches for at least the last few months.